THE MYSTERY OF THE SWARM
THE old “swarm in May,” beloved of ancient beemen, is rapidly becoming a
thing of the past. Modern hives and modern methods, although they have
not as yet achieved their main intent of abolishing natural swarming
altogether, yet tend to bring this extraordinary ebullition of hive-life
to its fulfilment later and later in each year. Far from being a virtue,
as of old, an early swarm, or indeed any swarm at all, is now accounted a
misfortune, even a downright disgrace, in scientific beemanship. And yet
the bees, though easy to discourage, are hard to teach. In spite of
roomy hives and a watchful bee-master ready to give them an unbroken
succession of young and fertile queens, and a whole houseful of new
furniture at a moment’s notice, still the bees go on playing this mad
game of wholesale truantry, and still the bee-keeper must stand looking
hopelessly on from the midst of his elaborate appliances, while his
property sings about his ears, or wings away into the upper skies,
irrevocable as last year’s mill-water.
[Picture: A swarm in May]
Beemen call it the swarming fever; and fever it is in very truth. The
reasons for it have long ago been crystallised into exact and accepted
phrases. An overcrowded condition of the hive; the desire of the bees to
get rid of a failing queen; the excitement of the queen herself at the
menace of coming rivals; the natural instinct of colonies to increase and
multiply—anything but the one all-sufficient and obvious reason, that
bees swarm because they suddenly and intensely desire it.
The story of the Sioux Indian,—won for civilisation from boyhood,
over-educated and overrefined, decorated with a high college-degree and
adorning a great pulpit, and then casting it all to the four winds,
stripping and painting himself, and raging away with his kind on the
war-trail,—has a near parallel in the behaviour of bees at swarming-time.
Instinct could never be a party to such an inconsequent, outrageous,
brilliantly reckless, joyous proceeding. But it is ever in the way of
reason to be splendidly unreasonable at times, and here the honey-bee
shows herself the true child of her origins. From a stern, self-elected
destiny-maker, callously pressing to the forefront of life over all
obstacles of heart and hearth, she changes back, for the nonce, into the
aboriginal bee-woman, thoughtless, pleasure-loving, improvident, spending
the garnered treasure of laborious days in the one mad moment’s frolic.
For it is impossible to regard the incident of the swarm as only one more
link in the chain of sober, calculating bee-wisdom. It is obviously a
lapse, a general falling away from the all-wise, public polity. For a
single hour in her drudging, joyless, perfect life, the worker-bee
battens down all the virtues, and rages forth like the Sioux Indian to
swill at the stream of forbidden love and laughter, unmindful of the
cost. Just when the common self-abnegation is yielding its rich
first-fruits of prosperity, and the hive is overflowing with its wealth
of citizens and possessions, this fever comes among them, and spreads
like a prairie fire. By all laws of prudence it is now, of all times,
that every child of the Mother-State should stand by her mightily, to
uphold her in the high place won for her by unending toil and innumerable
lives. But old ancestral memory wakens, calling irresistibly. Nature,
in the beginning of time, made the honey-bee to inhabit a tropic land,
where there was no need for pent, cold-withstanding houses, nor any use
in laying up provender for days of dearth, because the land flowed with
perpetual honey. Bee-life in those far-off ages was all dancing in the
sunshine, and the bee-woman had little to do but to fly to the nearest
brimming flower-cup when her nurslings wanted food, But a cooling world,
the ever northward trend of her race, and then the folly of her own
wisdom—intellect turning upon itself—all combined to lose for her the old
slothful paradise of plenty. The drone, reasoning inversely by the
wisdom of his folly, made a better compromise with fate. He held to his
life of ease and his gratuitous pleasures at all cost, and let his mate
go her way undeterred, blinding his eyes to the new necessities. Work
and responsibility gradually soured and sharpened and hardened the one,
while dependence on his womenkind as insidiously changed the other into a
creature of idleness and the senses. And when he came at last to realise
the outcome of it all, it was too late. The matriarchal commonwealth was
established, hedged round securely with a myriad poisoned blades. To
live a drone had been his heart’s desire, and now dronehood, mere
seminality, was allotted to him as a retribution. The things for which
man lifts his unregarded prayer all his life through, might very well
prove his fittest punishment, granted to him in the Hereafter: so little
can man or drone distinguish between the enduring things of life and
death.
But of all intolerable fates, that must be least bearable, to have wisely
willed and beautifully fashioned our own eternity; and then, being only
human, or at least reasonable, to find its goodness really smooth-going,
colour-fast, impregnable at all points, with never a bright break or flaw
to vary the monotony of well-doing. No wonder the honey-bee swarms,
breaks helter-skelter out of her prison-bounds of order, commendable
toil, chill, maidenly propriety; and goes rioting away for one short hour
of joyousness and madcap frolic, such as her primæval sisters looked to
as the common day’s lot, when there were no hives, and motherhood was not
the sole prerogative of one in thirty thousand, and when the sun burned
high and cheerily in heaven from end to end of the tropic year. It is
easy to be wise, and temperately scientific, in accounting for this
feverish impulse of the worker-bees, allotting it a sound and circumspect
part in the furtherance of the general polity. But is it not, in the
main, Nature—the atrophied sexual spirit—awakening, or at least stirring
a little in her age-long sleep? In the sultry August evenings the young
queens of the ant-hills pour out in unnumbered thousands to meet the
males, and people the ruddy sunshine with the glint of their wings. This
is swarming in its truest sense. The wingless, workful, underground
existence follows, but the love-flight of the ants, while it lasts, is
none the less a real, intensely joyous thing. And surely the
swarming-fever that so strangely and inopportunely seizes upon hive-life,
is at one with it in nature and spirit, although its original purpose and
value have been long ago lost in the ages.
[Picture: A mammoth swarm]
The one in the whole multitude who alone has the full inheritance of her
sex, the queen-bee, seems often at the fountain-head of the revolution.
Sometimes, undoubtedly, it is she who first develops this longing,
feverish unrest, and by little and little communicates it to the whole
colony. Here the variability of bee-nature comes sharply into evidence.
Some hives will show this restless spirit for many days before the swarm
issues, while with others the great upheaval seems, as far as the mass of
bees is concerned, to be a sudden unpremeditated thing occurring in the
midst of the universal content and industry. The preparations for
raising new queens are always taken in hand betimes, but probably this is
the work of the far-seeing, sober old bees of the hive, with whom
communism has become a settled and accepted calamity. The bees who will
ultimately constitute the swarm may be supposed to nourish their secret
desires from the first moment the queen shows signs of mutability; to
neglect all their old tasks, first in heart and then in reality; and
finally—when the queen’s mood has reached its culminating point, and her
work in the hive is in virtual abeyance—to throw down plummet and trowel
and hod, and rush forth in a wild, hilarious company, urged by a longing
that they are as powerless to resist as to understand.
In the study of bee-life one comes upon many questions, but seldom
answers to fit all. If the queen’s fecundation takes place only once in
her life, and nature intends this to suffice for her whole fruitful
period, it is not easy to see why she should go out with the swarm at
all. That she is not the inveterate recluse as generally believed, and
that she does occasionally make short flights in the open during her
laying career, is well proved. The desire, therefore, to see the light
again after a long incarceration cannot be urged as her reason for going
off with the swarm. A much more plausible notion is that the sexual
spirit is again roused in the queen, just as it seems to be roused for
the first time in the worker-bee; and that, with all, the journey is
undertaken as a mating-flight, a faint re-echo of a racial custom long
extinct, bearing the closest analogy to the marriage-swarm from the
ant-hill. It must be borne in mind that, although the queen-bee is
undoubtedly rendered capable of producing her kind of both sexes during
several years, as the result of a single fertilisation, it cannot be
incontestably held that she never again meets the drone under any
circumstances. There is nothing in her physical organism to prevent a
second coition, although with the drone this is impossible, for more
reasons than the all-sufficient one—that he dies in his marriage-hour.
In the old bee-gardens, where the “swarm in May” is still a living,
present thing, it is pleasant to sit with the proprietor under the rosy
shade of apple-boughs waiting for the swarms to issue, and “talking
bees,” which is the most nerve-soothing, soul-refreshing occupation in
the world. There never was a bee-keeper, new style or old style, too
busy to talk, provided that you met him with understanding, and were as
impatient as he of digressions from the all-important theme. One soon
gets tired of imparting information as to the wonders of hive-life to the
ignorant and plainly apprehensive stranger, and none sooner than he of
the old school. In the quietest apiary of pure-bred English bees there
are always a few individuals of crotchety nature, who will search you out
in the shady orchard seat, and, as like as not, knife you on the least
provocation. If you are a beeman, you treat these vindictive approaches
with unconcern. You go on listening to the old man’s talk, while the bee
shrills away at your eyelids, or creeps into your ear and out again. If
you keep quiet, she will soon relinquish the dull sport, and wing
harmlessly away; and the thread of the master’s discourse is not
interrupted. But the uninformed stranger is a nuisance at these
solitudes for two. He flinches and shudders; makes little irritating
retreats; beats about wildly with his hands; or, if he is made of the
sternest metal, he sits rigidly upright when he should be reclining at
his ease, and turns such a painfully polite, though distracted, ear to
his informant, that the stream of talk is sure to dry up incontinently,
and he feels as little welcome as ghostly Banquo at the feast.
When you have once lived among hives it is a sore thing to be without
their music. On warm days, winter and summer alike, there is always this
drowsy, dreamy song in the air; and dancing without the fiddlers is no
more depressing an occupation than, to a beeman, is loitering in a garden
of mere silent vegetables and flowers. Sitting now under the bower of
apple-blossoms and watching for the swarms, the full sweet note from the
hives comes over to you like the very voice of serene content. It
pervades the sunshine. It gently qualifies the slow wind in the
tree-tops. It lifts and falls like the lilt of a far-off summer sea.
This is the labour-song: the song of the swarm is very different. To the
trained ear the cæsura that presently comes in the midst of the music is
as clear as a pistol-shot, though you may detect no change. The old
bee-keeper stops short in his wandering tale about famous honey-years of
half a lifetime back, seizes key and pan, and hurries across the garden.
It is the old green hive again, he tells you, as you press hard upon his
heels—it is always the old green hive that has swarmed the earliest every
May for years back. And forthwith the key and pan begin their clattering
ding-dong melody.
[Picture: Hiving the swarm]
Old-fashioned bee-keeping is not always a matter of straw. Box-hives,
without, of course, the modern inside furniture, have been in use nearly
as long as the straw skep; and the hives in the garden are of this
ancient pattern. The old green hive is keeping well up to its
reputation. Already it is the centre of a swirling crowd of bees, and,
as you look, a dense black stream of them is pouring out of the entrance
so fast and furiously that it is almost impossible to distinguish what
they are. And the old wild trek-song is growing louder and deeper with
every moment, a rich vibrant tenor note unlike any other sound in nature.
There is no doubt at all of its import, as you stand in the wing-darkened
sunshine, caught up in the excitement of it all, and feeling much as if
you were facing a tearing sou’-west gale. Every bee of the twenty or
thirty thousand volleying madly to and fro overhead, is singing her
bravest and loudest. There is only one meaning to the whole gargantuan
chorus. It is sheer jubilation melodised: a wild, glad song of freedom,
as though not a bee amongst them had ever before set eyes on the sunshine
and the wealth of an English May.
The great door-key, a ponderous, antiquated piece of metal, beats out its
clanging note, and the swarm lifts higher and higher into the blue.
Gradually the sombre mist of bees draws closer together, looking now like
a little dark cloud strayed from a forgotten summer storm. Now it sails
slowly northward, and lightens, as the sunlight is caught by the beating
wings as in a net of silver; and now it veers away into the very eye of
the sun, and changes into black, revolving tracery again; whirring wheels
within wheels of insect-life, spinning-wheels making thread to weave the
garments of a whole nation, and humming as never spinning-wheels hummed
before.
But the beginning of the end is nigh; the time of singing is nearly over.
The old beeman stops his weird tom-tomming, throws down key and pan, and
points to the topmost branch of a young apple-sapling. You see a little
black knot of bees clinging to it no larger than a pigeon’s egg. A
moment later, and it has grown to the size of a double fist, and another
moment sees it twice this size again, as the flying bees stream towards
it from all directions. Now it is as big as a quart measure, and the
branch is slowly bending down under its weight. In an incredibly short
space of time the whole swarm has joined the cluster; they hang together
in a long, brown, glistening, cigar-shaped mass, well-nigh touching the
ground, and the wild, merry music is over for good.
Gently swaying in the sunlight, lifeless and inert but for a few restless
bees that hum about it, the sight of a settled swarm has an almost
uncanny effect on most observers. A little before, the whole garden was
filled with its deafening, joyous hubbub; now a strange silence has
fallen, and it is impossible to dissociate from its present state the
idea of an abject depression and disillusionment, as though the whole
thing had been but a mad escapade, of which the bees were now heartily
ashamed. If we may conceive the issue of a swarm to be a freak of
ancestral memory, the sudden irresistible impulse to follow an old racial
habit, long obsolete, it is not difficult to account for the obvious
change of mind that has now come over the absconding host. Packed within
the hive in a feverish, surging multitude, disabilities were not
self-evident as they are now, tried in the light of day.
“Violent delights have violent ends,
And, in their triumph, die.”
And now there is the morrow to be thought of: life to be rendered
possible in all odds of weather; a home to be made; the queen-mother to
be sheltered—she, the one remaining possession of the crowd, beggared
now, but so rich a moment before. There is hard work ahead, enough to
sober the giddiest among them. The madness has gone as quickly as it
came, and now the honey-bee is to show herself a reasoning creature, if
never before.
It is believed by most bee-keepers that a swarm selects the site of its
future dwelling some time before the expedition starts, in many cases
several days earlier. An old trick among cottagers is to place out empty
hives in their gardens, and these not uncommonly attract errant swarms.
A few bees are seen cruising about, and subjecting the hives to a close
scrutiny. These pioneer bees disappear, and after a variable time, from
a few minutes to a few hours, or even days, a whole army of bees suddenly
descends from the sky and takes possession of the new home. When the
interval between the appearance of the scouts and the arrival of the main
body, is only a short one, the reconnoitring bees have been manifestly
sent out by the clustered swarm; but in the case of long periods
elapsing, the scouts must have been sent in search of the new location
before the swarm issued. Probably, although the bulk of the party is
imbued with this reckless spirit alone, thinking and caring for nothing
else but the escape and the frolic, many of the older and wiser bees
undertake the matter in a temperate, businesslike way, as they would go
about any other important hive-operation. In one sense, therefore, the
old notion of there being “subordinate lieutenants, captains, and
governours” in a hive may not be so very far from the truth. That these
scouts are actually sent out to find a suitable site for the new colony,
either before the swarm leaves or while it is clustered in the open, is a
well-established fact, so that some of the bees at least must keep their
wits about them throughout the general chaos.
And with these wiser virgins must be reckoned the queen, in spite of the
fact that she joins in the public excitement and restlessness. For some
days before the great emigration her work of egg-laying is largely
arrested, and this retentive action renders her so heavy and bulky that
often she can scarcely get on the wing. The object of this is that she
may be all the more ready for laying when the new home is established.
It is also well ascertained that all swarming bees have their honey-sacs
well filled, and this loading up for the journey takes place just before
the signal for departure is given. There is great variation in the
behaviour of the different stocks in a bee-garden during the swarming
season, and many close observers are unable to detect any sure signs that
a particular hive is going to swarm. But it appears fairly well
established that, when a swarm is imminent, nearly all the bees of that
stock remain at home, even when all other hives in the garden are in full
foraging activity. Such a hive gives out a peculiar throbbing note,
which suggests the noise made by a powerful locomotive brought to a
standstill, but with full steam up, and impatient to be gone. Just
before the issue of the swarm there is often a curious lull in this
pent-up, forceful sound, and probably this is the moment when the
travellers are lading themselves up for the march. Immediately after—and
here it is difficult not to believe that a definite, authoritative signal
for the movement is given—a sudden stir and tumult begins in the centre
of the crowded hive, much like that caused by a heavy stone cast into
water. This radiates swiftly in all directions until it reaches the bees
near the entrance, and then the general rush for the daylight starts.
Where a hive is much overcrowded there will already be a cluster of bees
numbering many thousands packed tightly together on the alighting-board,
and sometimes covering the whole face of the hive. But this mass melts
away directly the swarming begins, the waiting bees taking wing all but
simultaneously with the others.
It was anciently believed that the queen led the swarm, but this view is
not borne out by modern observation. As often as not half the bees are
on the wing before she makes her appearance, and sometimes she is among
the very latest to leave, or she may decide at the last moment not to go
at all. In this case the bees do not cluster, but after a few minutes’
wild tarantelle in the sunshine they all troop back to the hive.
When once the swarming-party has gone off, the old hive seems to settle
down to its ordinary occupations as though nothing out of the way had
happened. The congested state of affairs no longer exists, but otherwise
the work of the hive is proceeding in the usual way. The bees left
behind are mainly young workers who have not yet commenced foraging, but
there is always a fair sprinkling of old workers and drones. Generally
the hive is queenless for the time being, the new queen not having yet
broken from her cell. There may be four or five queen-cells in various
stages of development, or rarely as many as a dozen. Sometimes, however,
the first of the queens will be already hatched and wandering over the
combs, meeting, as usual at this stage of her career, perfect
indifference from all she encounters. But hives have been known to send
off a swarm when the preparations for raising a new queen have been
scarcely begun. So variable is the honey-bee in all her ways.
[Picture: The swarm hived]
If the objects of swarming were merely to relieve the congestion in the
hive, and to change the mother-bee, the whole thing should now be at an
end. But the swarming impulse is rooted in far deeper soil than mere
expediency. With some strains of bees the fever seems to die out after
the one attack, and the stock settles down quietly to work for the rest
of the season. But more often than not this first taste of adventure
serves only to whet the national appetite for more. About nine days
after the first swarm leaves another swarm often follows, and this may be
succeeded by a third or even a fourth at a few days’ interval, resulting
in some cases in the almost complete extinction of the stock. The old
skeppists called the second swarm a “cast,” the third was a “colt,” and
the fourth a “filly.” It is difficult to understand how, in a community
where individual interest is so ruthlessly sacrificed to the general
good, this self-destructive policy should be permitted. But taking the
view that swarming is in the main a vague and incomplete resurrection of
a long obsolete habit in bee-life, a workable theory at once suggests
itself. Under primæval conditions the continued life of the
mother-colony may have been unnecessary. Its purpose may have been fully
served when a number of young queens and drones had been raised, and the
whole had swarmed out together, each to form a new settlement. It must
be remembered that the bee-hive, persisting indefinitely from year to
year, is really quite a modern creation, and became practicable only with
the invention of the movable comb-frame, which allowed the bee-master to
effect the renewal of combs. It has been seen that the brood-combs get
gradually choked up with the pupa-cocoons, which each bee leaves behind
it. These webs are so incredibly thin that a dozen of them make little
appreciable difference to the capacity of the cell, and combs have been
known to remain in use for brood-raising as long as twenty years. But
eventually they must become useless; and then, as bees do not, or cannot,
remove old combs to make way for new, the community must leave for a new
home, or gradually die out. Thus the age of the old hives was definitely
limited.
Modern beemanship has wrought many other changes in the life of the
honey-bee in addition to creating the permanent hive-city. The number of
bees in a single strong stock, housed in a modern frame hive, is probably
three times as great as that of a wild colony. The work of the
bee-master affects almost every aspect of bee-life, enlarging the scale
and the scope of all that the bees attempt. The result of this is seen
not only in an increased population and more extensive works, but in a
change in the very systems of life. Plans that work very well on a small
scale do not always succeed on a large. The sanitary problems of a city
are necessarily very different from those of a village, in principle as
well as in degree. And probably much of the ingenuity of system and
device observable in modern hive-life is directly due to human agency,
the new conditions introduced by the bee-master serving to educate the
bees to greater effort and resource.
The behaviour of these after-swarms offers a curious contrast to that of
the first one. If it were possible to point to one fixed and invariable
law in bee-life, it would be to the fact that a prime swarm will leave
the hive only on a fine, warm day, and generally about noon. But casts
and colts and fillies seem to take no count of time or weather, issuing
just as the mood besets them, early or late, and caring nothing,
apparently, for the conditions abroad. It is even on record that once a
second swarm came off at midnight, when the moon was at the full and the
weather very clear and warm.
There seems altogether much more method in the madness that seizes on a
colony swarming for the first time, and if thereafter the hive settles
down to its old courses, the national character for sobriety and industry
soon rehabilitates itself. But it is just the strength of this public
inclination towards order and labour which varies so greatly in different
hives. How matters are likely to go can be readily ascertained by
setting careful watch on the hive from the day the first swarm leaves.
There are sure to be several queen-cells, some capped over and almost
ready to hatch out, and others in various stages of development. All
these cells are constantly and assiduously guarded by the worker-bees,
because directly one of the queens is hatched, her first thought is to
make a speedy end to all future rivalry by murdering her sisters. She
comes from her cell evidently spoiling for a fight, and imbued to the
core with that inveterate hatred of her kind which is the ruling passion
of her existence.
That worker-bees and queen-bees should have an identical origin, and yet
that the nature of the one is to live in perfect harmony, while the
nature of the other is to be at perpetual war, is one of those mysterious
things in bee-life which probably will never be explained. If the
queen-bee of to-day can be really taken as an approximate type of the
aboriginal female of her race, it is not difficult to understand that
after her generation in force the communal life of the mother-stock would
become an impossibility, and that with the mating-swarm its natural
existence was brought to a close, much as we see it happen in wasp-life.
It is during the quiet nights, after the issue of a swarm, that the
peculiar shrill voice of the queen is most frequently heard. As she
strives with the guards that surround the cells of the other young queens
as yet unliberated, she continually utters this quick piping cry, and is
immediately answered by the smothered cries of the imprisoned ones, who
are just as anxious as she for the fray. If the swarming-fever is not
yet allayed in the hive, this war-cry is bandied to and fro unceasingly;
and the general ferment deepens, until, the condition of things having
seemingly grown intolerable, the young queen rushes out, followed by the
greater number of the bees. In the case of after-swarms, the concensus
of evidence is in favour of the belief that the queen is really the
leader of the party, although here again no positive rule is observed.
It may happen, however, that the stock is sick of all the turbulence and
unrest that have so long beset it, and that the general desire is to
restore the _status quo_. Under these conditions the sounds from the
hive may have a very different quality and meaning. The queen still
sends forth her shrill challenge, but now her cry is immediately followed
by a curious hissing sound from the bees. It is exactly as if they were
shouting her down, compelling her to silence by their own uproar; and
when the war-cry of the first liberated queen is thus met by a chorus of
disapprobation, it seldom happens that the stock swarms again. In a few
days the queen goes forth alone on her honeymooning adventures; and on
her return she is allowed to indulge her penchant for sororicide to her
heart’s content.